Posts Tagged Under: build a pc

NVIDIA’s newly-released GTX 1660 Ti behaves almost like a new and improved GTX 1070. It comes with the new Turing architecture found in the RTX series, but without the ray-tracing and Deep Learning Super Sampling technology; these premium features are still in the early stages of adoption, and aren’t useful or economical for a mid-tier GPU. The GTX 1660 Ti offers the advantages of new architecture without the expense and burden of superfluous features.

The GTX 1660 Ti achieves framerates at resolutions and settings roughly comparable to the GTX 1070. It doesn’t reach the level of a GTX 1080, but it’s an affordable upper-mid-range graphics card that will meet the needs of gamers and digital artists alike.

What would a versatile, powerful, balanced PC build look like with this GPU?

Apex Legends, the free-to-play battle royale title from the creators of Titanfall, launched on February 4 and quickly became a huge hit, gaining 25 million players in its first week. Built off the Titanfall universe, the game unites players in squads of three to battle it out against 20 other teams, all vying to be the last squad standing.

The game’s success is thanks in large part to how well the game runs on a variety of PC specs. But for this article, our purpose is simple: We’ll recommend PC builds for two different budgets, both intended to run the game smoothly—one for playing at 1080p with max settings, and one for playing at 4K with max settings.

Black Friday and Cyber Monday might be over, but the good deals on components keep coming—if you know where to look. We’ve scoured sales from several retailers to find two builds that provide great price-to-performance ratios.

Your computer has faithfully been by your side for all these years. You can’t replace it (for whatever reason), but with Christmas coming up, you decide it’s time to give your little friend a much-deserved gift.

Or maybe it’s frustrating you with sluggishness. Either way, you’ve got a great excuse to give it a little performance boost. What I’m here to do is to help you figure out what you can do to upgrade your older system on a budget.

This list is more suited to people who fit the following:

You focus on gaming or productivity tasks

You might use these components in another computer build

It is okay if the above doesn’t quite apply to you. This info can still be really helpful. Just keep in mind that you might have different upgrade options than listed.

I hope you did not miss nVidia’s conference yesterday! Lots of tech/game demos were shown, and lots and LOTS of fancy words (two hours worth) were used to tell us that nVidia is launching the new RTX series of cards.

AMD are coming out swinging, and they’re out for Intel’s blood with the flagship Threadripper 2990WX! With a bonkers 32 cores and 64 threads, this is not a CPU for the casual gamer; it’s a workstation powerhouse, designed for when multi-core performance is king.

AMD launched two CPUs today. The first is the 2990WX, a gargantuan 32-core/64-thread CPU $1800 ubermonster that will give every Intel board-member nightmares for the next ~2 years. Yes, you read that right: Thirty-two cores! Barely 2 years ago, a quad-core was the standard, recommended CPU for most people, and this 2990WX behemoth does not double or triple or even quadruple that: It octuples it! Maybe “octuples” is not a proper verb, but this is not a proper launch either.

The second CPU is the 2950X, a more modest 16-cores/32-threads $900 affair, but make no mistake: That makes it on par with Intel’s best consumer CPU, for half the price. In fact, if you took the time to read the reviews linked below, you will find that most reviewers enjoyed the 2950X more than the 2990WX.

I cannot claim that DDR3 was my first RAM-love; DDR2 has that honour. Or shame, if you prefer. But DDR3 has a special place in my heart, for it was the only RAM that was available when I built my PC. It was also the only RAM available when Orion and I built our office. For about a decade, it was the only RAM for normal users.